Uncommon Preparatory Charter High School

Uncommon Preparatory Charter High School, which opened in Canarsie in fall 2014, is part of the Uncommon Schools network, one of the city’s largest operators of charter schools. According to the organization’s website, the schools in the network focus on maintaining high standards and on getting students, many of them low-income, into and through four-year colleges. Uncommon schools employ what has come to be called the “no excuses” approach, where learning is highly structured, children wear uniforms and students are expected to be orderly even during lunch, which is centered on “fueling up for the afternoon's lessons.”

On most statistical measures, the schools in the network perform as well as and often better than district schools in similar neighborhoods.

Uncommon Preparatory uses a curriculum developed by Uncommon. It features 100 minutes of in-class literacy instruction for 9th- and 10th-graders. Students receive homework help and after-school tutoring, with struggling students required to attend classes on Saturday.

Most students in the school come from three Uncommon middle schools: Ocean Hill Collegiate, Leadership Prep Canarsie and Leadership Prep Bedford Stuyvesant.

Uncommon Prep is on the large South Shore campus, which it shares with five other small high schools, Brooklyn Generation, Brooklyn Theatre Arts, Victory Collegiate, Academy for Conservation and the Environment and Brooklyn Bridge Academy. The campus is far from any subway line, and students must pass through metal detectors to enter the building.

[photo by Uncommon Preparatory]

ADMISSIONS: The school has a very limited number of spaces available for 9th-graders who did not attend an Uncommon middle school. Those students are selected from a waiting list created when children applied to 5th grade. No new students are admitted after 9th grade. (Gail Robinson, school website and web reports, February 2018)